Sinéad

I enjoyed writing the How To Get The Best Out Of eBay blog post so much that I thought I’d share another way I use the Internet to save myself money. Booking cheap hotel deals.

The last few years I’ve really taken to going on city breaks, especially to London. The problem is it’s really expensive to stay there. I’ve had some pretty bad experiences of staying in hostels and 2 or 3 star hotels in the suburbs, and spent an absolute fortune on these awful little places and then transport costs to get into central London and back.

Lucky for me I discovered the websites Hotwire and Priceline (who will accept your Irish credit card, but their listings are in dollars), and also realised how wonderful the Last Minute dot com secret hotel deals were. These sites offer extremely reduced prices on hotel rooms, except they don’t tell you the name of the hotel you’re booking into, until you have confirmed and paid for your booking. These sites take full payment for your stay at the time of booking – so you can’t change your mind, which is great for the hotel because they are then guaranteed you won’t go cancelling your reservation.

What’s The Catch?

What, you thought there weren’t going to be any catches? They’re minor at best (unless you’re prone to cancelling your trips).

For example,  a few years back we stayed at the Le Meridien Piccadilly, an extremely centrally located 5 star London hotel . The reason they were offering a low price was because their hotel rooms were slowly being renovated, and the rooms that hadn’t been renovated yet were being offered at an extremely reduced price. Our room was immaculate, one of the nicest I’ve ever stayed in. Obviously they couldn’t offer these older style rooms at the same price as the modern rooms.

Like most hotels that use Hotwire etc. they didn’t want a low nightly rate associated with their luxurious hotel reputation and name. It’s one of the ways they can try to beat the search engines.

Recently we stayed at a brand new 4 star hotel, the Grange St Paul, very close to Tate Modern, right beside the Millennium bridge and across from the gorgeous St. Paul’s Cathedral. Another amazing location and a cheap deal, this time because the hotel was not 100% completed. It had only just opened but our room was perfect, no problems at all. Although their spa and pool area wasn’t operational – something a fully paying guest may have had a gripe with.

Sites like Hotwire and Last Minute offer hotels the ability to offer cheap rooms, without these cheap online listings being associated with their names. A 5 star hotel that’s having difficulty filling rooms, has just opened its doors or is having some renovations is able to offer a reduced price without tarnishing its reputation as being expensive and elite.

For me the most important thing about a city break is the location, I’ve learned this from all those bad experiences. As long as the room is clean I’m happy.  I’ve been very lucky with all the wonderful hotels I’ve actually ended up in. Obviously I’ve taken many risks booking into theses hotels and not knowing the names, but the location and amenities list (which is given on all of the sites mentioned) is enough for me to make a decision.

I’ve even happily booked into New York hotels using one of these sites.

I’ve heard some people gripe that they were given a small room after booking through these sites, but the staff do still treat you like a 100% paying customer and I personally have never had a bad experience.  I’ve always acted like a 100% paying customer and received equivalent customer service from the hotel staff.

I’ve had worse experiences in hotels where I was paying full price.

How to Figure Out the Hotel Names

If you’re going to use any of these sites listed you can of course try to figure out the exact hotels that are on offer. For Hotwire and Priceline there is a great user forum called Better Bidding where people swap the names of hotels that are currently listed on the site – allowing you to figure out the name based on the location, star rating and amenities listed.  If you’re uncertain about booking you can even try posting on this forum to see if anyone can help you identify the hotel.

With regards to Last Minute dot com, they use descriptions usually taken from either the hotel website or older offers, so you can try googling the descriptions and then match up the hotel info with the amenities list.

For further confirmation, you can check the Trip Advisor hotel listing. If the hotel is indeed on offer on one of these discount sites usually the recent Trip Advisor reviewers will have mentioned this fact. Reviewers will often say “got this as a secret hotel deal…” which is helpful.

Obviously this is a bit risky and I’m sure there are people out there that have had bad experiences. So, if you yourself have ever had a good or bad experience with a secret hotel deal – I’d love to hear your story in the comments.